Institute

Research reports

Physicians are collecting an ever increasing amount of data describing the health state of their patients. Is new knowledge about diseases hidden in this data, which could lead to better therapies? The field of Machine Learning in Biomedicine is concerned with the development of approaches which help to gain such insights from massive biomedical data.

Our research goal is to define in a mathematical precise way how visual perception works. We want to describe how intelligent systems understand images. To this end we study probabilistic models and statistical learning. Encoding prior knowledge about the world is complemented with automatic learning from training data. One aspect is being able to identify physical factors in images, such as lighting, geometry, and materials. Furthermore we want to automatically recognize and give names to objects and persons in images and understand the scene as a whole.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide a new means of communication that does not rely on volitional muscle control. This may provide the capability to locked-in patients, e.g., those suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to maintain interactions with their environment. Besides providing communication capabilities to locked-in patients, BCIs may further prove to have a beneficial impact on stroke rehabilitation. In this article, the state-of-the-art of BCIs is reviewed and current research questions are discussed.